


(how close is close enough?)

by isyotm



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 07:08:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9808628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isyotm/pseuds/isyotm
Summary: Jack loves Phryne. It takes him a while to figure it out and even longer to act on it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "MakeDamnSure" by Taking Back Sunday.

It feels like she’s always two steps ahead of him. When he reaches out to grasp her hand, to ask her to slow down, please, Miss Fisher, she disappears, leaving behind nothing but smoke and starlight and the sweet scent of French perfume. Instead, he learns to love the view of her from behind, and lives for those rare moments when she turns her head and smiles at his slow pace and he learns how to breathe all over again.

 

* * *

 

Jealousy is how he’ll lose her. He’s known that from the beginning, since the moment he first saw a gentleman visitor in her parlor, a strange man’s hat by the door, the first night of many nights he dropped by, unexpected and unannounced, for one last drink with her. To say good night, even if she wasn’t his to say good night to.

But with every case, they dance a little closer, he lingers a little later, she waits for him a little longer, and envy wraps itself around his heart like a hangman’s noose. Everything he touches comes away green, smearing all over his papers and his desk and the hat she gave him, and he’s afraid that if he touches her, he’ll stain her too. He wants her—sometimes so desperately it feels like a physical thing, a ghost dogging his steps, a shadow following his every move—but not in the way she allows herself to be wanted.

A man of action, but a good man, a noble man, who always does the right thing. The tension feels like it’s tearing him in half as he sits across from her and drinks from a crystal glass full of scotch he’d never be able to afford.

 

* * *

 

He wonders what it would be like to kiss her. He kissed her once before, at the Parisian café, his thoughts jumbling together at the terror on her face; all he could he think about was wiping that look away. A face made for confidence, for teasing smiles and effortless flirting that drives him slowly mad, should never be made to look like that.

Her skin had been soft beneath his fingers and afterwards he’d had to wash the lipstick off his face, the bright red color staining his mouth. He’d stared at himself in the mirror and allowed himself to think the unthinkable:

_I love her._

He revisits the thought many times, quietly tucked away in the same box where he stores his penchants for piano and Shakespeare. He feels guilt, harboring feelings for someone who isn’t his wife, knowing the way they taste, the way their mouth feels against his.

Perhaps, in the end, that’s the final straw that drives him and Rosie apart. Not the distance, both emotional and physical, or the quiet, civil dinners that belong to strangers, not man and wife, but the taste of her. And the wish to taste it again.

 

* * *

 

The man who went away to war, who marched off one fine day and never managed to find his way back from those foreign shores, is the man who would’ve been happy with Rosie. That man wanted a wife, someone to make a home with, someone to share a life with and raise children with. The man who came home was a shattered mess who closed his eyes and only saw bloodshed. At night, ten years later, he sometimes hears screams right as he wavers on the edge of sleep, fear yanking him firmly back to wakefulness as cold sweat covers his body. Occasionally the wind blows the wrong way and all he can smell is mustard gas, choking on the spicy sweetness of it as he reaches for the mask that will save his lungs and his life.

That man is not made for a life at home.

He doesn’t regret it. There’s no point in dwelling on the past. Even with the nightmares, the divorce, and all that came before, after, and in between, he would still have gone to war. A young man, of fighting age and in perfect health—as if he could’ve stayed at home and let someone else make the world safe for democracy. Not for the glory of it, but for honor, for national pride and duty to the crown. A noble man. The right thing.

 

* * *

 

Phryne Fisher is an unstoppable force. She sweeps in like a storm in her hats and her long coats, hiding a pistol in her handbag and a knife in her garter and a lock pick somewhere he prefers not to think about, and charms everyone out of their secrets, demure one moment, dangerous  the next. The whiplash still manages to catch him every time.

He thinks of himself as an immovable object. Rosie once called him her rock and, despite everything that happened between them, he thinks in some way that still holds true. Despite how much he’s changed, he’s also remained the same. There is right and there is wrong, and if sometimes he manages to eke out a space in between for what is good, that’s neither here nor there.

He feels himself moving now, though. The times he spends with Miss Fisher move him, little by little. He’s not the person he was before and, he thinks, neither is she. She’s slowed down, reined herself, if only to let him catch up. When he reaches out, he’s able to grasp more than just smoke.

 

* * *

 

He kisses Concetta Strano in the candlelit dining room of her family’s restaurant. The smells of wine and heavy cooking hang in the air as he presses his lips against hers and holds her close. Her hair is dark and pinned back in a compromise between traditional Italian and modern styles and all he can think is that it’s too long, coarse and wavy where it should smooth and straight. He already knows what she’s going to say when she pulls away from him. He’s spent years hiding his feelings from everyone, even himself, but at some point they must have snuck out, silently creeping from his heart upwards until they’re clearly visible on his face.

The thought is both frightening and thrilling.

 

* * *

 

He gets to kiss her again on an airfield and he pours everything he’s held onto, everything he’s tried to hide since the day he first met this strange woman, everything he’s barely let himself feel into it. _Please don’t leave_ , he wants to say. _I almost lost you once and it nearly killed me. I don’t think I could bear to lose you again._

He doesn’t say it—he’s gotten too good at pushing those words away—but she hears him anyway. “Come after me, Jack,” she says, breathless with excitement, her eyes sparkling. Permission to want her the way he always has.

He wants to hold her close and kiss her over and over again until their lips are sore and bruised, until all he knows is the taste of her, the smell of her perfume, the feel of her skin and her clothes under his fingertips. He wants to make up for all the time they wasted—no, not wasted. They weren’t ready for each other yet; a slow chemical reaction, two elements melding together to become something new. Now they are and he doesn’t want to wait another moment. But he does, he will, because she asked him to.

He steps back. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done. He watches her fly away. That’s even harder.

 _Come after me, Jack._ He smiles. As if she could keep him away now.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had bits and pieces of this in my head for the past few days, but I finally got a chance to sit down and write it all.


End file.
